STATE OF THE ART; Videotaping Minus Tape, With a DVD

UNLESS looking sheepish in public is your idea of fun, it's best to avoid making predictions about the future of technology. If, cornered at a dinner party, you absolutely must prognosticate, you should probably stick to relatively safe bets like these: Sony will make more compact things, Apple will make more beautiful things, and Microsoft will make more money.

But here's another prophecy that seems like an ever surer thing: tape is on the way out; discs are in. And no wonder: the digital signal on a CD or DVD never degrades or fades, even with repeated duplication. Discs offer random access, too: you can jump instantly to any spot. A decade from now, nobody will ever be late getting a rented movie back to Blockbuster because they had to wait for it to rewind.

Already, audiocassettes have yielded most record-store space to CD's, and movie stores' DVD collections are rapidly encroaching on the VHS shelves. Of course, those two examples involve prerecorded material. But the era of recordable discs is coming, too. Sony, Hitachi and others already make cameras and camcorders that use discs instead of tapes. Now Panasonic has taken aim squarely at the most popular tape-driven appliance of all: the VCR.

The Panasonic DMR-E20 does all the usual tricks, including recording and playing back television shows, live or on a timer. It even offers VCR Plus, the feature that lets you program a recording by punching in the show's code number from the television listings.

The twist, of course, is that the DMR-E20 doesn't accept tapes. Instead you can feed it either of two kinds of blank DVD's. First, it records onto DVD-R discs, which are relatively cheap ($30 for five) and which play back on most standard DVD players. In other words, Panasonic's machine can turn any video (except copy-protected ones) into a DVD for distribution to friends and family members -- not just television shows, but your own camcorder footage and old VHS material too. That's an important perk.

The trouble with DVD-R discs is that you can record on them only once. So Panasonic's invention also records onto a second kind of disc, something called DVD-RAM. These cost about $35 each but can be erased and reused over and over. Most DVD players attached to PC's or television sets can't handle these discs, but that's O.K. The idea is that you can leave one in your -- what shall we call it, a DVCR? -- for everyday recording and rerecording. As with traditional VCR's, you can specify a speed for each show you record. The recording modes let you fit one, two, four or six hours of video on each disc. The one-hour mode, of course, offers the best picture quality, but the quality of even the six-hour mode looks better than VHS does.

A moment with the only slightly frightening 52-button remote control teaches you the value of that random-access business. One button push summons a tidy table that lists every recording on the disc with a date, time, channel and (if you bother to type it in) title. Each time you highlight a listing in this table, the show plays in the background -- a nice touch that helps you remember what you taped. You use this same access screen to delete a recording or to protect one from deletion.

Another payoff: you never have to find a blank spot on the ''tape'' before recording something. This machine records onto blank areas of the disc instantly and automatically. In short, the E20 is incapable of recording over anything you haven't explicitly deleted -- a feature that anyone who has ever wiped out something priceless might consider to be worth $1,500 right there.

Panasonic even offers a basic ''playlist'' feature that lets you specify which recorded chunks (or even chunks of chunks) play back in which order. Immediate benefits of this feature don't spring immediately to mind, but maybe you could piece the scenes of ''Pulp Fiction'' back into chronological order.

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The durability and quality of your recordings, the ability to make DVD's for distribution, and that random-access business are the Big Three of the E20's feature list. But some of its secondary features offer a glimpse of the future, too.

When you use DVD-RAM discs (which transfer data much faster than DVD-R), you can also watch the beginning of a show that you haven't finished recording, or play back one show while recording another. There's even a button on the remote that lets you jump instantly forward in one-minute increments (labeled ''CM SKIP'' -- get it?). These are life-changing features once enjoyed only by the owners of hard-drive-based VCR's like the TiVo, a close relative of the E20.

Even TiVo doesn't offer this E20 goody, however: when you fast-forward at the first of its five scanning speeds, you get to hear the audio, which is surprisingly helpful when you're trying to locate a certain spot in something you've recorded.

All of this comes in what may be the best-looking metal box you've ever shoved under a TV. Both the black and the silver models feature an actual strip of mirror along the bottom edge. Not only does it permit surreptitious hair checks during parties, but it also flips open to reveal duplicates of the remote control's buttons -- a handy safety net for anyone whose couch eats remotes. This front panel also offers convenient input jacks in both composite or S-video formats for gear like camcorders and ordinary VCR's.

The back of the unit offers even more connectors. Some, like the component-video jacks, will be appreciated -- and understood -- only by the kinds of high-tech video nerds who would spend $1,500 on a VCR.

That's not exactly a bargain-basement price, but look at the bright side: this unit's 1999 predecessor did a lot less and cost $4,000. Furthermore, the E20 doubles as a state-of-the-art CD player for music and DVD player for movies, saving you about $500 in additional under-the-set contraptions.

Unfortunately, the price isn't the only thing that will prevent the E20 from becoming a breakthrough for the masses. It's so complicated, it should come with a coupon for a training course at the Learning Annex. Because some features work only with one kind of disc or another, the 107 pages of the mediocre manual are studded by tiny disc-format logos designed to help you keep the features straight. (It's a losing battle.)

In short, the E20 represents a dramatic step into our tapeless future, but one whose price, complexity and 25 jacks make it a machine clearly designed for proficient home-theater junkies. Nor is Panasonic the only company to see the light: This month Pioneer will release its very similar, $2,000 DVR-7000. (Because it doesn't accept DVD-RAM, however, this model lacks the record-and-play-simultaneously feature of the Panasonic.)

These machines won't stay in stratospheric price or sophistication brackets forever, though; don't forget that the first VCR cost $2,300. After a couple weeks with a DVD-based VCR, you, too, will find it easy, just this once, to predict the future of technology.